Media, Culture, and the Religious Right.

edited by Linda Kintz and Julia Lesage Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998 380 pp./$19.95 (sb)

"Timely" is an oft-abused shorthand in the language of mainstream book reviews: it tends to be either a way of praising the publishing industry for exploiting social currents or crises for immense profit or, in academic circles, to exclaim a notable coincidence between the beat of a scholarly study and the rhythms of the external world. Many popular and academic books, especially on media, do try to catch the edge of massive and surging events, monumental reorganizations of transnational culture, their concomitant shifting modalities of expression and feeling within the context of rapid mutations of technology; yet few strike me as urgent, pressing or needed. Media, Culture, and the Religious Right, however, delivers "timely" to its rightful, radical place: the book shows us something of what our time is, of how our time is mediated by and imbricated with institutions, structures and alternate cultures about which we (leftist intellectuals, artists and activists) are likely to know very little. As this collection of essays reminds us, we need to know a hell of a lot.

Indebted to Sara Diamond's 1995 study of the rise of the contemporary religious fight, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States, an analysis cited as authoritative and astute by many of the contributors to Media, Culture, and the Religious Right, the essays hone their focus to the religious right's radio, TV, film, print and video productions "in terms of its resources, its networks of individuals and organizations, its relation to the state, and its objectives and ideology." Although uneven at times in pitch and methodology, as a whole the volume should function as a guide, a handbook, a major resource (along with Afterimage's special issue on fundamentalist media [22, nos. 7/8], also seminal to the present volume) to begin to understand the issues.

First and foremost: if you dismissed the folks on the religious right as crazies, you should pay better attention. As the left dismisses misguided, mistaken, hyperbolic right-wing texts and rhetoric, the religious right is organizing. They are seizing control of mainstream and alternative media, and through them are building an ever-expanding constituency that is setting the agenda for the mechanisms that are undoing the infrastructures of our own workplaces and culture. The anthology's 14 essays do not function simply as a plea to know thine enemy. Instead, the book divides its concerns among four separate sections that together provide crucial context and history, individual case studies, rhetorical analyses and studies of specific popular and alternative media forms: "Overview of Contemporary Issues" (with sections on "Culture and the Religious Right" and "Christian Media," by Kintz and Lesage respectively), "Religious Culture in the United States," "Popular Conservative Media" and "Religious Right Advocacy Media." Topics range from analysis of Christian coalition leadership training videotapes and The 700 Club (the most prominent Christian television show), to figures such as Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Dobson, a religious psychologist, to cable and satellite broadcasting and the changing technologies of Christian media and case studies of anti-gay media and violence in Colorado and Oregon.

The editors are colleagues in the English Department of the University of Oregon; Kintz is the author of Between Jesus and the Market: The Emotions That Matter in Right-Wing America (1997) and Lesage is an academic writer, independent mediamaker and activist, as well as cofounder and editor (for the past 20 years) of the journal Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media. In their introductory remarks and in their own essays within the volume (Kintz's "Clarity, Mothers, and the Mass-Mediated National Soul: A Defense of Ambiguity" and Lesage's "Christian Coalition Leadership Training"), the editors center their attention on the dynamic relationship between institutions and culture, between structures and attitude and "the desires and mindset of the people being addressed, be they conservative political activists, fundamentalists and evangelicals, or those disenchanted with social welfare legislation." The concept of belief, elaborated by Kintz through the work of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, is crucial to understanding how "belief, influenced by religion, holds that certain truths are immediate, natural and God-given, 'inalienable' in the sense that they cannot be articulated because they are so deeply felt as natural and primal." Unswerving and deeply-felt conviction is also tied to what makes fundamentalists fundamentalists: belief in the Bible's literal correctness, its "inerrancy." The fluidity of belief, as opposed to ideology or a concept of false consciousness, drives the volume's task of understanding how real and perceived needs are addressed by Christian media and how these media speak to real people in communities across the country.

The contributors follow the editors' lead, bringing their considerable talents in cultural studies, sociology, political science, policy analysis, religious studies, lesbian/gay/bisexual studies, film and video studies, mass communication/broadcast analysis and activism to the media of the religious right. By way of historical background and context, Nancy T. Ammerman follows the editors' introductory essays with an overview of the entity referred to as "the religious right," which is by no means a monolith but has variations, multiple histories and complex strata of belief. Structuring the text by use of section headings, she details elements of fundamentalist theology, ideology and eschatology: the doctrine of inerrancy, evangelism (the fact that fundamentalists are saved and seek converts), the Rapture (the belief that one day, at "any moment," a heavenly trumpet will sound and the saved will rise into the sky), premillenialism (the belief that Jesus will come before the millennium/thousand-year reign on earth) and postmillenialism (the idea that "human effort might usher in the reign of God") and the establishment of tight subcultural communities with strict rules to test one's faith and witness the message of salvation. Though her overview is ultimately situated in a vision of democratic pluralism, Ammerman shows how fundamentalism intersects with secular education, science and Enlightenment philosophy. She chronicles the religious right's retreat from the spheres of law, politics and education in the early decades of the twentieth century, after it had lost the battle to reintegrate Church and State, to insist upon "law, government and social action as inherently religious." The members of the religious fight built subcultural institutions to nurture themselves in their battle against "secular humanism," that hegemonic worldview that largely structures contemporary public life and includes notions of gender equality, civil rights, the regulation of familial conflict, multicultural education, the autonomy of secular science and the legalization of abortion in Roe v Wade. In the religious right's subsequent battles against what they perceive as a coherent ideological threat in secular humanism, we witness the birth of fundamentalist institutions that will be central to the other essays, including those of broadcasting and publishing.

The section on "Popular Conservative Media" is remarkable in tracking and providing analyses of the rapid changes taking place in Christian television, publishing, home video and radio as they seek wider audiences. Razelle Frankl, author of the 1987 book Televangelism, tackles that topic following the Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart scandals in televangelism's bid for legitimacy (and Pat Robertson's diversification and appeals to non-fundamentalist audiences through The Family Channel). Eithne Johnson introduces another dimension of evangelical media, what she calls "videovangelism": the production and distribution of Christian home video (which even includes a version of Christian home exercise called "blessercize"). Meryem Ersoz and Jeff Land turn to radio, which is shown to be an immensely effective medium for establishing a unified community (such as in the case of Limbaugh and his fans called "dittoheads," indicating their agreement with his views) and for eliciting immediate action (in the form of telephone calls or faxes to elected officials or in the form of runs on school libraries to censor collections).

Aside from Kintz and Lesage's stellar contributions, the essay that most interests me and anchors the final section on religious right advocacy (as opposed to popular) media is Ioannis Mookas's "Faultlines: Homophobic Innovation in Gay Rights/Special Rights," initially published in Afterimage. Masquerading as a reading of the fundamentalist anti-gay propaganda video of the title (funded by a fundamentalist production company in 1993), Mookas's essay is actually a tour de force analysis of the rhetorical horizons of the fundamentalist movement and the possible responses on behalf of leftist intellectuals, artists and media activists. Mookas (himself an independent producer, writer and media activist) suggests that the video in its tortured, divisive and violent illogic can only be understood historically, contextually and within a truly critical practice that examines our own contradictions, sacred cows and blind spots (the racism of the lesbian and gay political movement for example). He provides a dual conclusion. The first calls for alternative media to examine those issues raised by the religious right's propaganda rather than the propaganda itself, for the fight has seized on realms of experience the left needs to address, and quickly. Hence the counterpart conclusion: "At the end of the day, even the smartest piece of media is no replacement for the exacting work of political organization."

This book is a tool for political organization and this knowledge can be put to good use. To understand the religious right's media, both mainstream and alternative, is to understand the roots of its appeal. It is to probe the real basis of adherence, the core of what Gramsci calls both belief and "common sense": an assumed worldview, complicated and at times contradictory but never questioned. Upon that worldview, understood to have arrived unmediated and in absolute clarity, the religious right builds infrastructures of violence and hatred. To combat violence we need to address the existing needs the religious right's institutions and rhetoric satisfies and to fracture the Other, the target that is created by that rhetoric. To offer one example, Lesage glosses a rhetorical move similar to that analyzed by Mookas: the use of sexuality by the right to "proffer an easy condemnation of groups deemed to be Other, which the right wants to make disappear." By way of rejoinder, Lesage suggests we need to appeal to those right-wing activists who have had abortions, those zealots with a gay or lesbian family member:

As those of us on the other side develop a way to oppose this targeting of the sexually "sinful" - the accused including people as diverse as teens, welfare mothers, homosexuals, artists, media makers in the entertainment industry, or women seeking abortions - we have to find more points of personal contact, to get ordinary people on the right to admit the many ways that they have an intimate tie to that which they oppose.

We need to be alert to new coalitions, quick to read possibility and astute in understanding the religious right's increasing mastery of media channels. This volume is an invaluable aid to these ends.

AMY VILLAREJO is Assistant Professor of film and Women's Studies at Cornell. She is author of Queen Christina (1995) and Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire, forthcoming from Duke University Press.